The Lone Tenement generates both a powerful
image of urban dislocation and a poignant allegory
of time's passage. The last remaining building
underneath the approaches to the new Queensboro
Bridge stands alone, everything else in the
neighborhood having long since been razed. The
oppressive roadway crushes down from the top of
the picture, and its span's dark shadow against
the red brick tenement seems to foretell the
apartment building's doom.

The whole composition directs attention to
the bridge's architectural mass. Pointed up toward
the black roadway from below, a system of vertical
elements marches left to right. A factory smokestack,
two lifeless tree trunks, the masts of a
moored ship, the slender tenement itself, and
smoke from a ship on the East River all lead across
the canvas to the bridge's heavy pier. The powerful
design and the superb handling of earthy
umbers, ochers, and siennas make it difficult to
believe that George Bellows had moved to New
York and begun painting only five years before.